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I’m a Missourian. I grew up right on the Mississippi River. The most important part of my childhood was spent just wandering in the woods. I spent a lot of time in nature. Mostly alone. If I could, I’d get a friend to go with me, but usually I’d walk their legs off. There were a lot of caves and real high bluffs, things to explore.

Lewis Lapham is the editor of Harper’s magazine, founded in 1850, and one of the nation’s best public affairs journals. I like Mr. Lapham; he is intelligent, and cranky, and honest. And he is free to write what he chooses, a freedom for which I, as a writer and a human being, am grateful.

I can neither vouch for the coherence nor justify the logic or lack thereof in what follows. It is a simple gushing outrage that winds up as a quiet self-proclamation, and as such, only the unknown rules of the wildness of psyche can apply here. Whatever of anger can be detected in these words, I dedicate to Leaf Diamant, who roasts on the coals of the unconscious those who are wise, brave, or naive enough to let him.

This is the first of a two-part SUN feature on the Prison-Ashram Project and its journal, Inside Out.

The project is an undertaking of the Hanuman Foundation, set up by the American spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and begun in response to letters from prisoners needing help and guidance for their inner awakening.

I went to a side show at the county fair. It was housed in a small trailer with a South Sea Island scene painted on the side. “Paradise on Earth,” the sign proclaimed. So I paid my quarter and went into a bare room with a table in the middle. On the table was a pair of playing dice in a quart Mason jar of dirt. I looked at the man standing behind the table. He shrugged his shoulders. His face was blank.

A friend of mine once told me he doesn’t eat in natural foods restaurants because they “make staying healthy so damned unpleasant.” Well, I’m happy to say that the three natural foods restaurants in the Triangle area, Wildflower Kitchen in Chapel Hill, SomeThyme in Durham and Irregardless Cafe in Raleigh serve nutritional foods that are a treat instead of a treatment.

Except for a few independent strands, her soft white hair is pulled back from one of the gentlest faces ever to smile through a window. Her dress is plain, as comfortable as her worn blue tennis shoes, yet feminine. Gypsy Hollingsworth is one of those women one might have seen traveling in a conestoga wagon during the nineteenth century: appearing as fragile as a dandelion puff-ball, yet as indomitable as the plant itself. The strong silent type, she is, with a girlish spark in eyes have seen 76 years.

I read that a murder takes place every 28 minutes in the United States. Which seems very frequent: two real people in less time than it takes for Kojak to get his man/woman. Guns, of course, are the overwhelmingly favorite means of dispatch, and within this family of ballistics, genus handgun, species revolver and pistol, the trusty six-shooter is the hands above the head winner. Which is not to editorialize in favor of the twenty-five dollar phallic symbol, as there are many other equally efficient and often less costly instruments of destruction. There are more than a few devotees of the knife; in the Philippines (as a National Rifle Association circular once informed me) the blade is preferred three to one.

We have in this country a great freedom. We have the freedom to say what we think. What I am wondering, though, is why so few of us say what we think. I wonder how many of us know what we think. Particularly the bumper crop of writers this country has produced in the last two decades.

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In each issue of The Sun you’ll find some of the most radically intimate and socially conscious writing being published today. In an age of media conglomerates, we’re something of an oddity: an ad-free, independent, reader-supported magazine.